All posts by Ash Blue

Ashton Blue is a web developer in San Francisco who engages in helping its citizens, design meetings, fighting the occasional nemesis, and public speaking. He also has a noteworthy obsession with coffee...

While there are tons of unity behavior tree libraries on the Asset Store. I haven’t found one that meets all my game dev needs. There is the amazing Fluent Behavior Tree library. But for me it’s missing features and the project isn’t currently in development. What I’ve been craving is an open source Unity behavior tree library that’s easily extendible.

I’m proud to announce Fluid Behavior Tree. An open source behavior tree system that’s easily extendable without forking the code. This means it’s updatable and quite resilient to breaking changes on upgrade.

Why is this better than other Unity behavior tree libraries?

Most behavior trees for Unity are paid products. There’s nothing wrong with premium paid projects (and devs should be paid for their time). But it can be difficult to share code for proprietary software. Paid projects also run the risk of being deprecated or having difficulty getting enough critical mass to start a continued community.

Ever since I delved into TypeScript 2 years ago I’ve been intrigued by the idea of an application built on it from front-to-back. This idea isn’t that odd and many Angular 2+ seeds are already using this tech stack. The MEAN Checklist is an example app that demonstrates a full stack TypeScript application. It was written in one week and deployed through Heroku. While it isn’t perfect and has some rough Heroku integration due to timeline constraints, it’s a great example app for rolling your own full stack apps.

*NOTE*: Heroku’s free tier is pretty slow these days. It may take a minute or two for the app to initially load when it wakes up out of sleep mode. As Heroku puts apps in a sleep state if they haven’t been used recently.

Ever had a team project with where merge conflicts seemed infinite? Code vanished constantly and nobody knew how? Or perhaps nobody could decide on how to create and merge new branches? Well you might want to consider GitFlow which solves all of these problems. It focuses on a master and develop branch, but allows you to create new features and releases for both of them with minimal risk of merge conflicts. What’s even better is popular Git GUI’s like SourceTree and Git Tower support it out of the box. For more info on GitFlow and getting started, check out the link below.

If you haven’t already heard Bootstrap 4 is being widely used by tons of companies in production. Although it isn’t finished yet, it’s quite stable and in beta. If you’re a Bootstrap 3 user you’ll notice tons of needed features have been added. Such as better syntax for handling margins and granular control over background colors.

One of the biggest hurdles when starting a new project is having a stable maintained CLI environment. Thankfully Angular 2’s CLI is now stable and ready for use. I’ve tinkered with it and I’m very happy with the toolset. Mainly because it has a lot in common with Ember’s CLI. Which is a tried and true development environment. Check it out at the link below.